Jeffrey Schumacher

After years of dominance by growth stocks, dividend funds had slowly become the wallflowers of the investment universe. Investors flocked to technology, e-commerce and internet companies, which emerged as the stars in the stock market firmament partly due to the corona crisis and the resulting generous monetary policy of central banks. Barring some brief periods of outperformance, value stocks slid deeper and deeper into the mothball bin. However, a value renaissance began in late 2020, which received a firm tailwind in 2022.

The year 2022 will go down in the books as a pitch-black year for investors. A cocktail of worrying developments, including a spike in inflation, tightening monetary policy, the economic implications of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an energy crisis and recession fears, resulted in a historically bad investment year in which both equity and bond investors suffered hefty losses.

The final quarter of a stock market year that many investors were keen to put behind them was marked by a number of notable and abrupt changes.  Only one global equity fund, the Gavekal Global Equities Fund, managed to close the year with a double-digit return for 2022.

Quality companies possess characteristics that investors usually warm to, but this was totally different in 2022. In every quarter, the MSCI World Quality index lagged behind the MSCI World index, and in every quarter a loss was collected.  On balance, it was lower-quality stocks that beat the market in 2022. A top five low-quality equity funds.

Among the top five actively managed mutual funds in the energy sector that are tracked by Morningstar, the BGF World Energy and NN (L) Energy funds stand out as top performers when considering the year-to-date performance of this type of funds.

Fund investors clearly lack faith in UK companies. There has been a net outflow from funds investing in UK equities over the past three years, with the €21 billion of outflows over the first three quarters of 2022 already setting a record. UK dividend stocks are being relatively spared by investors, but small-cap stocks, often more focused on the local economy, are being sold off in particular.

The third quarter has come to a close.  In the category of global large-cap mixed equity, Gavekal, JOHCM and State Street offered the best-performing funds during these three months, as measured by the performance of funds with a classification for the Netherlands in this week’s Morningstar Top 5. 

Factor investing, an investment approach that involves targeting specific drivers of return across asset classes, is attracting increasing interest from investors. Factors such as value, size and momentum have a long history in the investment world and have been extensively empirically researched and documented in the academic literature. Although there are different variations for these factors as well, the factor quality is perhaps the most debated, both in academia and in practice.

The erratic first half of 2022, which sent leading stock market indices into bear market territory, has clearly left its mark on the fund universe. Fund houses active in the bond markets saw a general outflow of investor money, and although on balance equity funds attracted investor interest, large differences could be seen at the category level. Active funds did not appeal to investors, while the least sustainable investment funds were also out of favour.

Concerns about rising inflation, monetary tightening, supply chain problems, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and strict Covid measures curbing the Chinese economy dominated investor sentiment in the first half of 2022. The speed and intensity of the sell-off that hit fast-growing, highly-rated, and loss-making companies in particular was relentless.